Felony convictions hinder efforts to access stable housing even if no prison time is served, study shows

Even if they’ve never been in prison, people with a felony conviction still struggle to access stable housing, according to new research from a Rice University sociologist.

“Housing instability after conviction and incarceration: untangling being marked from incarceration,” written by Brielle Bryan, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice, compares felons who were incarcerated with those who were not. Nearly half of all Americans with a felony conviction have never served time.

While other research has shown that incarceration leads to housing instability, Bryan found that felony status alone was enough to cause “housing instability” – defined as staying in temporary housing (homeless shelters, motels, or on the street) or often moving out — what she discovered could affect up to 12 million Americans.

“Unfortunately, the stigma of a felony conviction doesn’t seem to disappear with time,” Bryan said. “When a person is in prison, he has to deal with being removed from his neighbourhood, his social network and the job market. But eventually individuals can recover from the disruption of incarceration and start rebuilding their lives. However, this does not seem to be the case. is the case with felony convictions – my work shows that they track these individuals and severely disrupt their residential trajectories.”

So what can be done? Bryan noted that while significant efforts have been made to reform criminal justice, they have largely focused on reducing prison populations through shorter sentences and greater use of community-based corrections. However, this does not change the number of people marked with criminal status or the stigma they face.

“Increased investment in return programs, as President Biden and others have urged, is a great way to ease the transition from prison back to society, but they won’t help the 12 million Americans with high-crime convictions who have never served time.” Bryan said. “If we want to give people a second chance, we need to do things like remove barriers to obtaining professional licenses, introduce more automatic data-sealing laws like Colorado and Pennsylvania have, and work to limit the use of unregulated and often inaccurate online criminal background Until we take these kinds of steps to reduce the stigma surrounding previous crime convictions, these individuals will face major hurdles as they try to rebuild their lives.”

The study uses data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.